Go with the pink

In The Secret Life of Bees, August Boatwright is a woman of considerable class and intelligence; a woman who, nonetheless, paints her house Caribbean Pink.

Never mind that it’s the most garish shade of paint she’s ever seen.

Never mind that half the town will talk.

She paints with shocking pink because her sister May has picked it. May, who crumbles beneath a world’s worth of suffering. 'Cause if it’ll lift May’s spirit, August reasons, it’s a good choice of paint.

Midway through the story, the book’s teenage protagonist, Lily, asks August about the unexpected hue. And following the explanation, August starts to add: “The problem with most people--”

But Lily interrupts, supplying, “--is that they don’t know what matters and what doesn’t.” She’s proud of herself, assuming she has completed August’s thought. She’s wrong.

August clarifies that what she was going to say is this: “The problem with most people is that they know what matters, but they don’t choose it.” She knows that May’s well-being is vastly more important than painting the house a reasonable color. But still, she confesses, it was hard to go with the pink.


I find this maxim at work in my life, too. It’s hard to go with the pink.

I know it’s the littlest things that end up mattering. Building train tracks with Em when I’m wilted from exhaustion. Letting Elle crack an egg for the batter, even if it sends me fishing out bits of the shell. Stopping my work at the sewing machine to look at Bee or Zee when they talk, to hear the heart veiled within the words, to listen. But these are such little things, really, so easy to not do. Yet all these bits collect, add up to form the people my children will become.

So I’m working on it, practicing this choosing-that-which-matters, trying to value the valuable and set the rest at the curb. Never mind the inconvenience. Caribbean Pink it is.